Inter-bug tracker bug tracking

Launchpad can track a bug in an upstream bug tracker in the same way as it tracks bugs across multiple projects within Launchpad using bug watches. This page details how Launchpad interacts with upstream bug trackers to pull remote bug information into the Launchpad user interface.

Plugin-enabled bug trackers

Recently, the Launchpad team have release plugins for Bugzilla and Trac which enable an API on the remote bug trackers that install them. Launchpad can then use this API to communicate with the remote bug tracker, allowing it to perform more advanced interactions with those bug trackers than it can with bug trackers that don't have a plugin installed, such as:

Bi-directional comment synchronisation - comments on remote bugs that Launchpad is watching will automatically be imported into Launchpad. Replies to those comments in Launchpad will automatically be pushed back up to the remote bug tracker.

Bug importing - Launchpad will be able to import new bugs from the remote bug tracker as soon as they are created, making them available to Launchpad users without anyone having to create a bug watch.

Bug pushing - Launchpad will be able to automatically push bugs up to the remote tracker. This allows upstream projects to manage their bugs entirely within their own bug tracker without having to worry about going to Launchpad to find bugs that may have been filed there.

Installing the plugin also makes Launchpad <-> Remote tracker communications far more efficient, since Launchpad is able to request data about only the bugs that have changed since the last synchronisation took place.

Standard bug trackers

Most bug tracker software offers several ways to get bug information. Aside from the standard web interface that most people would use to file, browse and comment on bugs there are usually means to export bug data in a more machine-readable format, such as CSV or XML.

Where available (and where no Launchpad plugin is installed), Launchpad will use these machine-readable methods to extract bug data from the remote bug tracker. For all standard bug trackers Launchpad can only currently import the status of remote bugs.

Below are a list of the remote bug trackers that Launchpad can import statuses from: